IBM joined DIF because we believe it will take open community and standards to achieve the vision of self-sovereign identity. For example, members of DIF are focused on the establishment of an open web platform standard within the W3C standards organization called Decentralized Identifier (DID). A DID will provide a standard global resource naming scheme for identity.
There is a global Internet standard for naming resources called a uniform resource identifier or URI. When you type https://www.ibm.com into your browser, a URI ensures you always end up at IBM’s website. Similarly, we need one standard to identify an individual, as well.